For more than two years, police, liquidators, creditors and private investigators looked for him.
Lawyers from Hong Kong, the US and Canada searched the globe trying to find the fugitive.
The Canadian spy agency had also looked at the mega-dealmaker as a frontman for China's acquisition of high and medium-tech companies - firms that he stripped down in the west and to take their technology back to the east.
Many believed he fled back to a secret hiding place in China, where the communist leadership sheltered him.
At the heart of the search were two significant question marks.
Where is the hundreds of millions of dollars James Henry Ting made through business deals And who were the unseen forces behind the tycoon
Now those who searched for him are dusting off their old files to answer those questions as the dishonourable dealmaker has been arrested in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong police said Ting, was arrested after returning by helicopter from Macau - the bastion of his old compadre gambling tycoon Stanley Ho.
The South China Morning post quoting police sources said Ting's return "appeared to have been planned" as his lawyers were waiting at the Hong Kong police headquarters when he was taken in for questioning.
Ting gave no indication as to why he had suddenly decided to resurface and face a series of charges including false accounting.
His lawyer told a court he had returned to 'clear his name' over Hong Kong's biggest corporate collapse.
The lawyer said Ting, 52, had not returned earlier because he had suffered from a bad back.
The legal battle over the collapse of Ting's business empire is expected to be one of the biggest and most protracted in Hong Kong's corporate history - a case already being referred to as "Hong Kong's Enron".
In a Hong Kong court last week, Ting was accused of falsifying the audited accounts of the Canada-based Semi-Tech (Global) Company for the year ended January 31, 1999 to show that it had a 50 per cent stake in an associated company, MicroMain Systems.
He was denied bail and remanded in police custody.
The case was adjourned until June 2. Ting's lawyer said the defendant would surrender his Hong Kong travel document but could not produce his Canadian passport as it was still in Shanghai.
Police said that investigations by the Hong Kong Commercial Crime Bureau concerned US$1.8 billion (HK$14 billion) of assets and found that the false accounting entries took place between November 1997 and July 1999 and were made in Akai's ledgers.
According to company documents, Akai, formerly known as Semi-Tech, reported a record loss of US$1.72 billion in 1999.
It was subsequently forced into liquidation in August 2000, when a number of suspicious share transactions made in the months leading up to the company's collapse were found.
Ting, the Shanghai-born businessman, who once commanded a US$5 billion empire employing 100,000 people in 120 companies, was reported to have been living China following the collapse of his global empire.
Like other ambitious young men who based their businesses in the former British colony, was a citizen of the world, an entrepreneur who constructed a universe of interrelated companies and finances from Toronto to Tokyo to New York.
The flamboyant Hong Kong tycoon's life is a classic rags to riches story.
He once worked as a janitor to pay for his education. But later, he had a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce and enjoyed a jet-setting lifestyle.
He owned a palatial US$5 million (C$8.7m) home.
However, his lifestyle of excesses eventually led to the spectacular crash of his company. Ting's father moved his family from Shanghai to Hong Kong when he was seven. Ting was 13 was his father died.
After finishing high school, he moved to Australia. There he met and married an Australian woman before emigrating to Toronto to study engineering.
While still in his 30s, Ting commuted regularly between Toronto, Hong Kong and the US. He negotiated computer assembly deals that would make him a millionaire.
But his break came when he was introduced to Macau gambling magnate Stanley Ho. Ho later personally guaranteed a US$100 million ($177.56m) loan to help buy out the US-based Singer Sewing Machine Co in 1989.
Starting his career as a small-time electronics manufacturer in Markham, Ontario in the 1980s, Ting built up a business under his holding company, Semi-Tech Group, which specialized in the rescue of well-known but tarnished brand names such as Singer Sewing Machine Co. and Sansui Electric Co., the Japanese consumer-electronics maker.
By the mid-1990s, Ting's group boasted listings in stock markets around the world, including not just New York, Tokyo, Frankfurt, and Hong Kong but also Bombay and Dhaka.
Then, in a chain of failures that stunned employees, stockholders, and creditors, Ting's web of businesses unravelled, culminating in the largest corporate collapse in Hong Kong history, when his main Hong Kong subsidiary, Akai Holdings Ltd., fell apart after recording a US$1.75 billion loss in 1999.
By early 2000, most of his companies had stopped doing business, slid into bankruptcy, or been absorbed by other companies. This spectacular fall left lenders and bondholders with unpaid debts of some US$2 billion.
In Hong Kong alone, HSBC Bank has yet to recover some US$200 million, potentially its largest loan loss in more than 135 years of operating in the enclave.
And Ting He sold his palatial $5 million Hong Kong compound in June, 2000, and vanished casting a shadow over Hong Kong's financial community.
In November 2001 a civil lawsuit launched by Semi-Tech bondholders demanded $578 million from Ting, from the directors of Semi-Tech, from Ting's investment bank, Bankers Trust, and from his auditor, Ernst & Young.
Plaintiffs say that a series of transactions violated the terms under which the company issued US$300 million in bonds in 1993.
The suit charges that Semi-Tech directors, including Ting, "conspired to loot the assets of the debtors."
In Canada, Ting was a darling of the Chinese-Canadian trade lobby while at the same time coming under the radar of spy watchers.
Even the Prime Minister's Office website lists Ting's Semi-Tech as a member of Team Canada's business deals with China.
The Globe and Mail 'Report on Business magazine' once ranked Semi-Tech the 10th largest employer in Canada with 50,000 employees. In 1996 it was ranked as the 20th fastest growing company by revenue in Canada
At the same time China watchers and intelligence agencies could not get the politicians in Ottawa to heed warnings that Semi-Tech may be a vehicle for China to acquire high and medium technology and engage in economic and industrial espionage.
Furthermore, with its hundreds of companies, many of which are set-up in Bermuda and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and other locales notorious for hiding money-laundering activities, some of the Semi-Tech subsidiaries looked like shell companies for corporate shenanigans.
The book, 'The Hidden Establishment' by Brian Milner says that "all the money that has flowed towards" Semi-Tech "is a gesture of support for China, from investors who see Semi-Tech's strategy as furthering Beijing's commercial interests."
Among the companies Semi-Tech showed as part of its organization were several Chinese state-owned companies, related to military and intelligence activities obviously using what seemed to be a Canadian consumer based company as cover.
Famous consumer brand names acquired by Semi-Tech include:
The former American Singer Sewing machine company, with its gigantic chain of stores, financial operation, and manufacturing - most of which has been transferred to China. Singer after 146 years of operation has been declared bankrupt by Semi- tech.
- The former German giant Pfaff consumer and industrial sewing machine company. Pfaff has also been declared bankrupt by Semi-tech.
- The former Japanese consumer electronic company Akai.
- The former Japanese consumer electronic company Sansui.
- Manufacture of television production and equipment of the Finnish company Nokia as well as Nokia's brand rights for Finlux and Luxor
- Emerson Radio in the U.S.A.
- Consumer Distributing, a huge chain of retail stores in Canada and the U.S.A. Consumer Distributing was also declared bankrupt in Canada causing many to lose millions of dollars.
In the mid-90's, a team of Canadian analysts working on the controversial Sidewinder report warned the government that Semi-Tech and its masters including Ting and Macau's Stanley Ho were taking huge stakes in data processing firms.
These companies did data processing that included economic intelligence, for many of the largest companies in Canada and confidential computer data processing for the majority of the federal and provincial governments and universities.
Researchers found that Semi-Tech acquired Canadian computer and information technology and services companies whose clients were the 700 leading companies in Canada including the federal government; some doing classified computer work for the Department of National Defense.
These companies included:
- Data Crown - "Semitech acquired classified computer work when it purchased Datacrown, a large Canadian data processing company in 1988.
- Canada Systems Group - Canada Systems Group had applied to undertake the development of COSICS, the Canada On-line Secure Information and Communication System that was to link the Department of External Affairs, the RCMP, CSIS and National Defense. The project was suspended by the federal government due to lack of financial resources."
- Manitoba Data Services Ltd. - purchased for $18.3 million in 1990 in agreement with the Manitoba government
Other companies included: AIC Computers, Westbridge Computers, STM Systems Group, Network Corp., Armadale Systems Inc., New Ven Consulting, and Ottawa Consulting Services
Semi-tech also held a 27% interest in ISM (Information Systems Management Corp.) Canada's leading computer services company, a subsidiary of IBM Canada, that provided computer services for business intelligence data capture, payroll electronic mail, services in banking, insurance, manufacturing, health care etc.
"They thus gained access to a phenomenal amount of information about Canada's leading companies, their plans, technical secrets, business ideas etc. including personal information about millions of Canadians," said a Sidewinder team member.
"But nobody in Ottawa wanted to know about the unseen hand behind Semi-Tech and the dangers it posed,".
Sidewinder, the project that looked at the influence of Chinese tycoons, Beijing spies and triads on Canadian business and politics was disbanded and discredited by the mandarins in Ottawa. - APNS
